another killer feature idea : detect when someone puts the conference call on hold and auto-mute that line. Particularly useful for those with irritating hold-music.
My observation is that simplicity tends to cause polarization. This (having lovers and haters) is actually quite good, IMHO. More conversation means more chances to learn from your users/customers.
To combat that, I usually use my short breaks to collect articles using Read It Later, or Instapaper... then use the longer breaks to actually read them.
Having worked with warehouses and warehousing systems, this is actually a real problem.
A normal non-refrigerated warehouse can pick items (grab from the shelf) well in advance of the "pick up" time for carriers, so orders are ready to go when the truck arrives.
In Ernie's model, it becomes a challenge having items ready when customers arrive, yet minimize the amount of time perishables are out of refrigeration.
This could be addressed a few ways :
1. Asking the customer roughly when they expect to pick up their orders
2. Staging orders in refrigerated and non-refrigerated sections for quick final assembly at pick-up
3. A mechanism like you've described to give some advanced warning to the warehouse.
Very interesting stuff indeed -- I'm envisioning some wicked cool cross and upselling opportunities with punchfork.com's API.
"Even with the ever-increasing prominence of iPhones and Androids, it is exceedingly unlikely that you'll be at a location where multiple people own those phones, have downloaded color, and are using the app at that precise moment"
The only hard part is getting people to install it. Once it is installed push notifications or constant polling in the background can tell you when others nearby are using it -- I imagine a combination of fine GPS, WiFi SSID comparisons, and cell tower IDs would fine tune it. Of course, not being a mobile developer I don't know whether the last two are even obtainable by a third-party app.